April 29, 2012

...a collection of videos on the new ‘must-have’ feature is now on PVC.

The Global Performance Cache, group of time-saving technologies consisting of a global RAM cache, a persistent disk cache, and a new graphics pipeline (along with the Cache Work Area In Background command), is considered the best new feature of After Effects CS6. In addition to earlier intros, Brian Maffitt has returned with one.

April 23, 2012

The cost of ownership of Production Premium is about the same at $1899/$375 upgrade, and the Cloud service master collection is $50/30 per month by year ($600/$360), or a la carte per app ($20/month for AE); see pricing and a summary of details at ProDesignTools.

April 22, 2012

CS6 dominates news, but there were still new scripts and a plug-in, and assorted tutorials... @ PVC.

Note: the roundup is replicated here as a backup...

Here’s another summary of the last few weeks or so of news on After Effects— this time CS6 dominates, but there were still new scripts and a plug-in, and assorted tutorials.

AEMap from AE Scripts "creates equirectangular projection maps with 286 separate countries (masks on solids) under 177 jurisdictions (pre-comps). It comes with the 'AEMap Utilities' which contains tools for dealing with a bunch of layers and nested comps." The elements are "continuously rasterized" so they may work in CS6 extrusion and ray-tracing.

cm_Barndoors, new from AE Scripts, lets you "apply a set of barndoors to existing lights, or create a new light with barndoors attached. Each set of barndoors gets a Grip layer that gives you control over each barndoor’s rotation, the entire barndoor assembly rotation and the softness of the barndoor shadows."

Dark Energy for Adobe After Effects is a new Windows-only plug-in that features de-noise and film simulation modules for images up to 1920×1080. It's sold now at a pre-release pricing. Some of these features, leveraged using Nvidia GPUs, are available in the plug-in:

James Zanoni shows background and multiple machine rendering with AERender, droplet for OS X, in Terminal (command line on the Mac) in After Effects. In reality, that droplet just uses aerender, the executable program in the same folder as the After Effects app that has a command-line interface with which you can automate rendering. You can find details in Automating rendering with aerender in AE Help, and in Background rendering with After Effects. If you want an interface that leverages aerender, see BG Renderer, a script with UI at AE Scripts. Here's James Zanoni:

In An A to Z of Building Projections - Part 2, Chris Zwar "takes a detailed look at the After Effects workflow used to create the animations for the Melbourne projections, and how the ZBorn Toy and Freeform plug-ins were used." Here's the performance itself:

The new features of After Effects CS6 (ships with same version as AE CS 5.5) also include changes concerning mocha, disabling launching Mocha from AE. Mamoworld details the advantages of using MochaImport+ in MochaImport+ and CS6. Here's the basics of this recently updated script:

You can continue to look to Adobe blogs and AdobeTV for further feature summaries and links to new tutorials. Among many reviews, see particularly the in-depthAfter Effects CS6 (P)Review by Chris and Trish Meyer.

Peter Salvia and Steve Crouch introduce SpeedGrade CS6 in FCProse Ep6 - FCP to SpeedGrade via Premiere CS6 (from Red Scarlet at 4K, transcoded to ProRes LT and cut in FCP 7, to conforming to native RAW .R3D material inside of SpeedGrade CS6 for a full 4K DI finish). Also below is a nice interview with the Speedgrade team by Fxguide.

Gary Adcock really likes Speedgrade CS6 - "...truely Native support for raw camera formats, not just RED's R3D, but how about working in native ARRIRAW ( with presets included) from Alexa directly in PPro, and oh yeah, the app that made use of all of that power is now also part of the CS6 Suite of Tools. Speedgrade is here, maybe not for everyone, but certainly for this user, I am glad it is back."

April 10, 2012

AE news was busier than expected before a change of gear at NAB—this time with CS Next, 3D text and bevels, stills in AE, 3 new scripts,mocha, and assorted tutorials, and plug-ins new and old. Pictured is Trapcode Mir.